Employee Net Promoter Score (the ultimate guide)

The Employee Net Promoter score (eNPS) is a relatively new implementation of the classic net promoter score (NPS). It’s a simple way to identify and understand how likely your employees are to recommend your organization as a great place to work.

It’s very easy to administer, score, and track over time. It also won’t take very long to complete, compared with traditional employee surveys. In this guide, we’ll teach you everything you need to know about the employee net promoter score, so you can start measuring satisfaction inside your organization.

Why should you care?

Why should you care about the employee net promoter score?

Many organizations will run an annual survey, collect hundreds of data points, and never measure how that trends over time. The eNPS forces you to quantify the results (we’ll discuss how this is calculated soon). It’s very common for organizations to pick and choose different numbers over time when giving the opportunity, especially if things aren’t going so well. By only measuring a single value, there’s less opportunity to select numbers that make things appear better than they really are.

The eNPS also greatly reduces the barrier to getting started measuring an organization’s health. The more complexity added the less likely people are to do something. At the end of the day, the eNPS is simply a quick way get started measuring company culture.

Brief History

The Net Promoter score has traditionally quantified a customer’s relationship with an organization. We can apply this same mindset to employees, which are arguably your most important customer.

The net promoter score is used by over 60% of the Fortune 1000 and was first introduced by Fred Reichheld in this HBR article. Results from these surveys have been correlated to revenue growth as well.

Enough of the history, let’s talk about how it really works.

How the Employee Net Promoter score works

The employee net promoter score asks a single question to measure employee engagement:

“On a scale of zero to ten, how likely is it you would recommend this company as a place to work?”

Employees respond with a score between 0-10. Typically a follow-up question is asked:

What is the reason for your score?

This is an effort to get a better understanding of why the respondent chose a particular score. It adds context to the number that was chosen.

Response Grouping

Responses are then grouped into three buckets shown below:

Promoters – people who answer 9-10.

Passives – people who answer 7-8.

Detractors – people who answer 0-6.

Make sure to group your responses into these three buckets, you’ll need them to calculate the score below.

Calculating the eNPS Score

To calculate the score, use the following formula:

(Number of Promoters — Number of Detractors) / (Number of Respondents) x 100

Let’s use an example to solidify how this works. XYZ corporation is a hundred-person organization. You’ve received the following results:

60 people answered 9-10 (promoters)

15 people answered 6 or less (detractors)

25 people answered 7-8 (passives)

The calculation would look like this:

(60 — 15) / (100) x 100 = eNPS score of 45.

Track internally over time

As mentioned earlier, the eNPS is a great way to quantitatively measure employee “happiness” over time. We recommend trying to improve an existing internal score instead of worrying what the right benchmark is. Each company is different.

In other words, treat this score like a runner might view a result at a track meet. They may not be the fastest person in the race, but they can always try to beat their existing score.

eNPS guides strategy (primarily)

While the employee net promoter score can guide tactical changes, its main purpose is to guide strategy. For promoters, you can find out exactly what they love about working inside your company. For passives, you can understand the few roadblocks holding them back from doing their best work, and for detractors, you can understand the major issues that exist.

Due to the nature of only asking a single follow-up question, it brings to light the major reasons someone gave the score. There’s not much fluff in an employee net promoter score.

How often should we send it?

The answer to this question depends on the cadence of implementation. If you can make changes quickly, we recommend sending this once per quarter. Most organizations will only be able to do this 1-2x/year. If you need something more frequent, use a pulse survey instead.

Make sure to distribute results quickly to teams so changes can be implemented. Many organizations will segment the scores by department. We recommend doing this only if the team size is big enough to obfuscate the person’s identity.

In conclusion

The employee net promoter score is a great way to measure the health of an organization. Make sure to set internal benchmarks over time, and continually push for the highest score possible.